ABSTRACT:
Brian Rotman
argues that (one) 'mind' and (one) 'god' are only conceivable,
literally,
because of (alphabetic) literacy, which allowed us to designate each of
these
ghosts as an incorporeal, speaker-independent 'I' (or, in the case of
infinity,
a notional agent that goes on counting forever). I argue that to have a
mind is
to have the capacity to feel. No one can be sure which organisms feel,
hence
have minds, but it seems likely that one-celled organisms and plants do
not,
whereas animals do. So minds originated before humans and before
language
--hence, a fortiori, before writing, whether alphabetic or ideographic.

Among the questions of origin that have
preoccupied our
minds most, five stand out: the origin of the world, life, humankind,
language
and mind. Big-Bang theory is our current best bet on how the universe
was born,
about 14 billion years ago. Life on earth emerged from the primal soup
when
light polarized certain proteins and their structure became
self-replicating, some
4 billion years ago. Our own species is more recent: about 300, 000
years old,
based on the anatomy of our bodies, including our brains. Language
itself
leaves no traces. Verba volunt, scripta
manent (and writing came too late in the day: about 10,000 years
ago, a
technological innovation rather than a bodily mutation). No one knows
whether
we could speak when we left our first fossils or artifacts. So language
began
somewhere between 300,000 and perhaps 50,000 years ago.

The origin of mind is the
most vexed question of all. Some define our species as the talking
ape, which would make language capacity part of our very essence, with
us from
our very first days. Is it conceivable that we could speak before we
had minds?
According to some authors (such as my teacher, Julian Jaynes), our oral
tradition (we might even call it our illiterate oral 'literary'
tradition,
since it includes the songs and tales of Homer even before we had
invented a
way to write them down) might all have been mindless, the concept of
'mind'
having been invented or discovered quite late in the hominid day, much
as the
concept of 'world,' 'life,' 'human,' or 'language' -- or, for that
matter 'origin'
-- might all have come relatively late in the day.

But is having a mind the same thing as having a
'concept' of
mind? Am I a Zombie until I come up with the word 'mind' to name what
we refer
to by that term? I am certainly not dead until I have a concept (let
alone a
word) for 'life,' and I surely have a world even before I name it, or
inquire
about when and how it began.

Not only is it unlikely that our species started
out as
mindless Zombies, but our predecessor species were not mindless either,
any
more than our contemporary cousins the apes are, even though they
cannot speak.
All of us, whether speakers or mute, including our pets, have mental
states,
just as surely as many of us see colors and all of us feel pain, even
though
some of us have no names or abstract descriptions for them – or for
anything at all.

So if having a mind predates having a language,
surely it
predates having a written language. Yet according to Brian Rotman –
formerly a mathematician, now a philosopher of technology – not only
the
mind, but other 'ghosts' like God and the Infinite were born only after
we had
not only writing, but alphabetic writing. The road leading to this
surprising
conclusion is a rather complicated one, the critical factor, for
Rotman, being
embodiment – and disembodiment.

Back to origins: Not only is it still a matter of
speculation when language began, but
it is equally uncertain how and why
it began: What were those dramatic Darwinian
advantages that language conferred on our species, sufficient to shape
our
brains, relatively quickly, into what they are now, with their unique
inborn ability
and predisposition to acquire and use language, an ability every bit as
biological as the bird's ability to fly, the fish's ability to swim,
the eye's
ability to see and the ear's ability to hear?

It is not that speculative hypotheses about
language origins
are lacking: It was the ease with which one could come up with the
'bow-wow'
theory, the 'pooh-pooh' theory and the 'yo-he-ho' theory that inspired
the Société de
Linguistique de Paris
to ban the topic of language origins from the late 19th to
the late
20th century. No, what is lacking is a Darwinian
evolutionary
scenario as compelling and credible as the ones we have for the origins
of
flying, swimming, seeing and hearing.

Here's one candidate: Maybe the way language
helped us to survive
and reproduce more successfully than other species was that it allowed
us to
transmit to one another by word of mouth what all other species have to
learn
the hard way, through individual, time-consuming, risky, trial and
error
experience. We will not settle here whether this was indeed the
Darwinian
advantage of language, or something else again. But whatever the
advantage was,
it had to have led, through evolutionary trial and error, to that
radical
genetic and physiological shaping of the language regions of our brain
into
what they are today, just as Darwinian advantages had shaped wings,
fins, eyes
and ears. So it seems quite natural to ask whether language originated
directly
in the form of spoken words, or it started out in some other bodily
form.

Human beings who are born deaf today have the same
language-specialized brains the rest of us have, but because they
cannot hear,
they use gestural languages -- of which there are many, just as there
are many
spoken languages. And like spoken languages, gestural languages are
capable of 'saying'
anything and everything that can be said in any other language. It is
important
to understand, however, that gestural language is not pantomime. Some
of its components
may have originated in pantomime and practical acts but, exactly as in
spoken
language, the shape of its words is irrelevant insofar as their
linguistic
function is concerned, as Saussure stressed: The meanings of linguistic
gestures do not reside in their resemblance to what they stand for, any
more
than those of spoken words do: 'Mama' may well have originated from the
movements and sounds of nursing, but that similarity is not relevant to
its
linguistic meaning and use; its shape might as well have been
arbitrary, as
most words are.

Brian Rotman, however, singles out and stresses
the
nonarbitrary, iconic shape of nonverbal gesture, as a means of
depicting and
expressing resemblance and emotion. He reminds us that this
nonlinguistic
expressive power of gesture is a consequence of its (likewise
nonarbitrary)
embodiment: It is the expressive power of bodily movement. It is also
the
depictive power of sensory images, which, as we all know, are worth
much more
than a thousand words. Rotman notes that with language, this
sensorimotor and
emotional expressive power is reduced, replaced instead by the symbolic
descriptive power of words: 'telling' instead of 'showing.' Spoken
language
still has tone of voice and other nonverbal accompaniments to
supplement its
expressive power, and gestural language retains even more of this
nonverbal
expressive potential. But, one can ask, is this nonlinguistic
accompaniment
still really necessary, now that we can tell all?

Written language proves that it is not. The
mathematician,
Alan Turing (to whom this topic owes more than a few of its fundamental
insights)
not only co-invented the computer but showed that it was universal, in
that it
could compute anything that was computable. Turing also designed the
'Turing
Test' whereby we try to ascertain whether a device has a mind by
testing
whether it can say and understand everything that a human being can say
and
understand. In other words, does the device have the full expressive
(and
understanding) power of language (including computation), as a human
being
does?

The Turing Test excludes the 'body' of the
candidate device,
restricting all interactions to written ones, precisely because Turing
did not
consider those other, nonverbal expressive powers (showing
rather than telling)
to be essential to having a mind – or at least to testing whether a
device has a mind. (He left it open whether the device might have to
possess
other capacities, nonverbal, embodied ones, not tested directly, but
nevertheless
needed in order to pass the verbal Turing Test. For example, if you
wrote to
the device 'What does a sunset (or a smirk) look like?' it would not
only have
to draw upon the infinite number of words that a real person could use
to
describe what a sunset (or a smirk) looks like, but it would also have
to be
able to describe what it feels like to look at a sunset (or to see or
produce a
smirk). It is very possible that no device could do that – on a scale
that was indistinguishable from a human being – if it had never seen a
sunset and never felt what it feels like to see a sunset or to see and
produce
a smirk. These are embodied experiences and capacities.)

What the Turing Test exploits is the expressive
power of
disembodied language. This is the expressive power of arbitrary verbal
symbols,
divorced from the expressive power of nonverbal, bodily gesture. It is
the
power of symbolic propositions
– with truth-values ('true' or 'false') -- to say anything and
everything. Showing, unlike telling, is neither true nor false. It is
only if
you 'subtitle' it ('this is how he strangled her') that pantomime takes
on
truth value. But that is the truth value of the proposition (what is
being
told), not of the 'this,' which merely points to what is being shown.
(Pointing
has no truth value either; nor does emoting. So 'expressive' really has
two
different meanings, one objective, formal and truth-valued, the other
subjective, somatic and emotional: 'feels meaningful to me.')

According to Rotman, language only became fully
digitized,
disembodied and divested of all residual analog properties when it
became
alphabet-based. (He calls this property 'phonemic,' which is curious,
since
phonemes are in fact the minimal meaningful acoustic/articulatory units
of
spoken language; he probably means 'graphemic.') Only serially ordered,
speaker-independent, written language from which even the residual
iconicity
and embodiment of ideographic writing systems like Chinese has been
eradicated
can give rise to certain 'ghostly' (likewise disembodied) effects, such
as the
concept of a unitary mind, independent of the body, or the concept of a
single,
disembodied deity, or the abstract concept of infinity (consisting of
the
totality of things one can count, if one goes on counting forever).
Rotman argues
that (one) 'mind' and (one) 'god' are only conceivable, literally,
because of
(alphabetic) literacy, which allowed us to designate each of these
ghosts as an
incorporeal, speaker-independent 'I' (or, in the case of infinity, a
notional
agent that goes on counting forever).

Rotman's arguments are largely hermeneutic, rather
than
analytic or empirical. We are invited to accept many interpretations,
based
largely on analogies and associations. (This use of written language
seems,
ironically, rather analog and impressionistic -- even verging sometimes
on a
private vocabulary: the reader will encounter many odd uses of words,
such as 'machinic,' 'monobeing,' and 'invisibilization').Rotman seems to me to be right only about the formal concept of
a
completed infinity, which may indeed depend on first having a formal
notational
system, if 'infinite' is to mean anything more than just the intuition
that
counting can go on and on.

The last part of the book is intended to be
prophetic:
Having transited from the preverbal world of sensorimotor gesture to
the verbal
and eventually alphabetic world whose disembodiment gave birth to the
immaterial
mind, godhead and infinity, we are today beginning, according to
Rotman, to
return, thanks to computer and network technology, to an increasingly
'liquid'
and virtual world that is more like somatic gesture than serial
graphemes. The
predicted effect will be that this virtual bodily reality will dissolve
the
alphabet-bred mind, which will move 'beside itself' into a parallel,
fragmented, distributed state rather like multiple personality disorder
or the
paradoxical state of 'superposition' in quantum mechanics.

It is not obvious that this is a fate consummately
to be
wished for. The usual etiology of multiple personality disorder is
early
childhood trauma rather than spending too much time in front of a
computer
screen (although one now has students who, unlike the previous
generations that
had worried whether someone else might be a figment of their
imaginations, now
serenely contemplate the possibility that they themselves might be a
figment of
someone else's imagination – a part of their 'virtual reality').

So yes, our minds and our senses and our sensory
inputs can
indeed play tricks on us. But Descartes probably put his finger on a
firmer
reality when he pointed out with his cogito
(which is 1st person singular, not cogitamus
ergo sumus!) that there are some things that one cannot
doubt, as long as one is compos mentis:
I can doubt that I have a body, but I cannot doubt that I have a mind,
if by 'mind'
I mean (as I should) whatever it is that I (not 'we') happen to be
feeling at
the moment. Things may not really be the
way they feel, but they indubitably feel
the way they feel – and feelings have only one feeler (even when the
feeler is feeling plural). Virtual reality can alter what
is being felt, but not that
it is being felt. (It takes anaesthesia to do the latter, and that's
not the
kind of technology Rotman is talking about.)Hence
I 'know' I am not a Zombie (nor multiple Zombies), and
my prelinguistic predecessors knew it too, about themselves, even if
they could
not express it. So do our pets.

In a foreword to this book, Timothy Lenoir,
Professor of
History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford
University,
suggests that we can only perceive or know what someone else perceives
or knows
if we have an abstract symbolic representation of it, not only in
language, but
in writing. Current neural evidence suggests otherwise. Not only I, but
illiterate, alalic moneys have "mirror neurons." These are active if
and only if either I or you are in the same bodily state (e.g., gazing
at a
sunset, or smirking). We don't know how these neurons do it, but it's
certainly
not via language, let alone writing, and it's unlikely to be based on
abstraction
or reasoning, rather than a more elemental direct perception, as with
most
other things we perceive, such as size, shape, thrill and threat.

To have a mind is to have the capacity to feel. No
one can
be sure which organisms feel, hence have minds, but it seems likely
that
one-celled organisms and plants do not, whereas animals do. So minds
originated
before humans and before language --hence, a fortiori, before writing,
whether
alphabetic or ideographic. Biological evolution altered bodies
physically,
shaping wings, fins, eyes, ears and eventually the brain basis of
language
capacity. Any further reshaping of our mental lives has so far been
technological and informational rather than biological and somatic,
including
the invention and use of writing as well as computer technology.
Technology may
eventually reshape our bodies too, but that will be through physical,
not
virtual reality.